Pebble Announces First Ship Date, Demos ePaper Smart Watch

If you’ve been waiting with bated breath to get the Kickstarter-backed Pebble grayscale smart watch, you can finally see a backlight at the end of the tunnel. Today at a CES 2013 press conference, Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky announced that the first units will begin shipping to Kickstarter backers on January 23rd, with priority given to those who backed the project earliest.

In a 20-minute presentation, Migicovsky demonstrated the key features of the new watch, which uses a 1.2-inch ePaper display to provide up to 7 days of continuous battery life. He also said his company built its own OS from the ground up, but licensed a professional Bluetooth stack to maintain solid connectivity with your Android device or iPhone.

He stated that the Pebble is water-resistant enough to be used in the rain and contains future-proof elements like Bluetooth 4.0 and a magnetometer that currently serves no purpose, but may after later updates. The watch will be available in several colors including gray, red and orange.

During an extensive demo, Migicovsky showed off some of the Pebble’s key features, including its multiple attractive faces, some of which are animated, its ability to show email and SMS alerts and integration with a Web tool called “if this, then that” which allows you to configure custom alerts using a variety of services such as weather and news. Using the service, Migicovsky configured the weather service to alert him if it snows in Las Vegas.

He briefly showed the Pebble’s iPhone app, which allows you to control settings on the phone. Migicovsky said the company is also working with third-party developers to build their own Pebble apps.

The official Geeks Geek, as his weekly column is titled, Avram Piltch has guided the editorial and production of Laptopmag.com since 2007. With his technical knowledge and passion for testing, Avram programmed several of LAPTOP's real-world benchmarks, including the LAPTOP Battery Test. He holds a master’s degree in English from NYU.